The Warcraft Systems Team has published a blog on important 6.2 itemization changes:

Loot item levels from Hellfire Citadel are different from past raids--they increase as you progress through the instance. This is so players killing a late-zone boss do not risk disenchanting most drops because people already have better gear from earlier bosses:

Groups will receive a much more predictable number of drops when defeating a boss.

Set items will reliably drop in Personal Loot.

The overall rate of reward for Personal Loot has been increased.

The new Personal Loot UI shows what you've won to your entire group, so your party can share in the excitement.

Blizzard

In World of Warcraft Patch 6.2, we’re making some changes to our Raid itemization with the goal of improving the Personal Loot experience, creating more interesting distinctions among items, and providing rewards that more closely reflect the challenge players face to earn them.

Personal Loot Improvements

The Personal Loot system offers several advantages to certain group types, but there are still several areas where we think we can make improvements. Our goals with Personal Loot going forward are threefold:

Make Personal Loot more consistent and rewarding.

Bring Personal Loot up to be competitive with Group Loot, so players who prefer Personal Loot receive rewards comparable to those you get from groups using Master Loot or Need/Greed.

Celebrate rewarding Personal Loot within the group in a way that captures the excitement of receiving rewards in Group Loot.

First, rather than treating loot chances independently for each player—sometimes yielding only one or even zero items for a group—we’ll use a system similar to Group Loot to determine how many items a boss will award based on eligible group size. As a result, groups will receive a much more predictable number of drops when they defeat a boss. In addition, set items will reliably drop in Personal Loot, just like they do in Group Loot today. The end result is that groups using Personal Loot will acquire their 2- and 4-piece set bonuses at around the same time as groups using Group Loot acquire theirs.

We’re also increasing the overall rate of reward for Personal Loot, giving players more items overall to offset the fact that Personal Loot rewards can’t be distributed among group members. We know that finding that one awesome specific trinket to round out your gear set can be difficult with Personal Loot, and this should help increase your odds.

Finally, the most visible change is the new Personal Loot UI. Part of the fun of raiding is progressing and improving as a group, not just as an individual. The previous Personal Loot system celebrated your own rewards, but would bury what your groupmates received in the chat log. However, the moment when your friend finally wins that long sought-after sword can be just as important to you as that moment you won your boots—and we wanted the game to help you celebrate it, too. Now when you loot an item, everyone in your group will see what you won!

These Personal Loot improvements aren’t limited to Hellfire Citadel—we’re updating all of our Draenor dungeons, including Mythic dungeons, to use the same system.

Loot distribution underway here

Secondary Stats

In the early days of World of Warcraft, Raid bosses didn’t have that many items to drop—there were only 150 items in all of Molten Core, and more than half of those were set items. This small amount of total gear in a Raid meant there might only have been one or two items per slot in an entire tier that were appropriate for your class—and if you were a Hunter or a Shaman in a place like Molten Core, that meant your only option for a belt in the entire Raid zone was your class set piece. On top of that, if an item wasn’t class restricted, it was shared between many other specializations with wildly different ideas of which stats were good or bad. When very few items were available to fill any given slot, the desire to make sure they were useful for many specs led us to keep from straying too far from a 50/50 split on secondary stats.

...we’ve decided to shake things up with how secondary stats appear on Raid loot in this patch.

As the game has evolved, we’ve increased the number of items that bosses drop per kill, as well as the variety of items they drop. We’ve made secondary stats more competitive with one another, and we’ve reduced the frequency of oddball items that were only useful to a few classes. This made more items useful to more people, but eroded the distinction and sense of identity that items held in the past. Too rare became the situation where you knew for sure that this drop was your awesome piece of equipment, and that feeling of finding a truly special item came less often than we would have liked.

To help bolster that sense of excitement, we’ve decided to shake things up when it comes to how secondary stats appear on Raid loot in this patch. Inside Hellfire Citadel, you’ll see a wider range of high and low secondary stat values on items than you have in a long time. Alongside some tuning adjustments that should ensure your attuned stats are the right choice, this change should also make it easier for you to identify which items are good for you in a more interesting way than just “equip the highest Item Level.” Our goal is to help make Hellfire Citadel Raid items more distinct and meaningful to you, and we hope you’ll let us know how things feel once you start collecting your new gear.

Item Level Ramp

As this expansion has progressed, it’s become increasingly apparent that there is a mismatch between challenge and reward for guilds that delve deep into large Raid zones. When the Item Level for rewards across a given difficulty of a zone is flat, a caster staff from Heroic Imperator Mar’gok is largely equal in power to one from Heroic Tectus, despite Mar’gok being the far more challenging boss. We often see and hear about guilds killing a late-zone boss like Blast Furnace for the first time, only to disenchant most of the drops because everyone already has loot from earlier bosses in those slots. On top of that, many guilds move on to higher difficulties before they fully complete a difficulty, because Heroic Darmac loot is stronger than Normal Blackhand loot—and you can get it for much less effort.

To address this, we are structuring Hellfire Citadel so that the Item Level of the loot awarded by bosses increases as players proceed deeper into the zone, culminating in Archimonde—providing both the ultimate challenge and the ultimate reward.

... it feels good to get higher-level items as you progress through a zone.

We’re doing this for a few reasons. First, it feels good to get higher-level items as you progress through a zone. One of the more prominent pieces of feedback we got about Blackrock Foundry was that it felt unrewarding for challenging bosses like Iron Maidens to drop loot that was just as good as—or possibly worse than—Gruul’s.

This also breaks up where your best items are in a good way. The power of the items that you can get in a particular slot will differ based on how far through the zone you are. The best boots for you will likely be different if you are on Normal Gorefiend than they would be if you’re on Heroic Mannoroth, which would be different than if you’re on Mythic Iron Reaver, and so on.

We can’t overstate how much we appreciate your feedback on topics like this, especially when you’ve taken the time to join us on the Patch 6.2 PTR and experienced the changes for yourself. As always, everyone’s encouraged to join us and other testers in the 6.2 PTR Discussion forum as we prepare to unleash Hellfire.

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Feedback

Bashiok

Mounts take a fairly significant amount of time to create, and in this case the Runesaber mount was made somewhere in the 6.0 production timeframe, and I believe was complete before 6.1 hit the PTR. Release of store mounts is intentionally consistent and takes place months before they actually release. In this case we actually waited for a bit as we wanted to ensure the Token rollout went smoothly without adding in the potential complications of a store mount going live at the same time. In short: we didn't crank this thing out yesterday as an answer to something. Production takes a long time, and we have them on a regular release cadence. You can be certain than every few months there will be a new store mount.

As for why we make mounts for the store at all: most obviously of course because there is a significant portion of players that like being able to purchase cosmetic items for real money. Certainly there is also a desire by a significant portion of players to be able to obtain the Ironhoof Destroyer from Mythic Blackhand. Not everyone will be able to, or maybe even want to, obtain either mount, but we know that a wide variety of players look for a wide variety of acquisition methods for cosmetic items. Also certainly different players will look differently at these two mounts based on their acquisition methods, and it's the main reason why we don't mix game and store mounts. If someone buys a mount off the Shop we don't want there to then be confusion as to whether it's the Shop version, or a recolor obtained through in-game means. We essentially purposely ensure shop mounts stand out as shop mounts.Yeah, of course no one said "people want more content! let's make a mount!" and that was sort of my point, these will release regularly regardless and aren't tied to other game content.

Also, of course, the crux of the complaint isn't really (I believe) that this mount exists, but just that some people think it's poor timing to be selling something while they're looking for a new raid tier, etc. I don't think there's anything anyone can say to that except for us to just keep working on and release the content they're looking for. But in any case, I thought I'd try to offer a reasoned response as to how this mount is not an answer to anything, but just a standard timed release like all the other ones before it.

you are telling me, that to get the nicest mounts in the game, i have to buy it with real money?and i can count on them coming out with frequency?

No, I did not say that, and gave an example of the Mythic Blackhand mount also offering a rare and difficult to obtain mount. Judging by reaction to some of the store mounts, I would argue they are not at all the nicest looking mounts in the game. :) Certainly all of the most sought after mounts are valued due to their rarity, and store bought mounts are generally not very rare. Value will differ from person to person though, I suspect.

You say they take a long time to create and ok that makes sense, however I think what people are getting at is the "nice mounts" more or less have to be bought.

I don't believe there was much if any difference in production time between a shop mount and, say, the Vicious War Kodo in 6.2. Or the mechanostrider for that matter. Or Felsteel Annihilator. You could argue they're all "reskins" in that they use existing animation sets, but all three are new mounts with custom geometry and textures available through gameplay. Whether you think they're as cool or not is probably up to personal preference.

its very frustrating to hear blizzard take this stance on mounts. suddenly mounts are such a big production... like wrath and bc didn't happen.

The art in the game is overall of much higher polygon and texture resolution than it was. Production "costs" (e.g. time) only increase as we increase graphical fidelity. Not to mention huge and ambitious projects like updating 20 race models, all with updated customization options, new animation sets, etc. This expansion has a huge amount of very time and quality-control intensive art in it. But I do legitimately understand it's sometimes difficult to see the forest for the trees.

Comentarios

Comentario de lankybrit

Seems good, I guess. I presume this applies to LFR Personal Loot too, not just Raids that select it as an option. And I presume the gear scaling in LFR will follow along too.

Comentario de iettlopp

on 2015-05-20T12:24:51-05:00

for pve player this seems kinda nice, but no love for pvp yet. no arena or bgs.

Comentario de Crusalis

on 2015-05-20T12:25:25-05:00

Really catering to those casuals

Comentario de halospartan750

on 2015-05-20T12:28:48-05:00

Very interesting. Good to see that they are trying to make Personal Loot more appealing/rewarding. My guild has made the transition to Master Loot after several sessions of trial and error but if we are going to see more loot consistently with the new PL system we may switch back.

Comentario de oomm

on 2015-05-20T12:29:44-05:00

should also make it easier for you to identify which items are good for you in a more interesting way than just “equip the highest Item Level.”

Have they accomplished this?

I'd rather not discard half of the loot in the raid as inferior because it drops lower ilvl items. When I'm progressing on the final boss will I only want upgrades from "harder bosses" and grind the rest of the early bosses with the sole purpose of getting them out of the way in order to get to usable loot?

Comentario de halospartan750

on 2015-05-20T12:31:07-05:00

Really catering to those casuals

How? These changes are just flat better for everyone.

Comentario de Crusalis

on 2015-05-20T12:42:15-05:00

Really catering to those casuals

How? These changes are just flat better for everyone.

Finally, the most visible change is the new Personal Loot UI. Part of the fun of raiding is progressing and improving as a group, not just as an individual. The previous Personal Loot system celebrated your own rewards, but would bury what your groupmates received in the chat log. However, the moment when your friend finally wins that long sought-after sword can be just as important to you as that moment you won your boots—and we wanted the game to help you celebrate it, too. Now when you loot an item, everyone in your group will see what you won!

This is really, really something on casuals on LFR care about. Personal loot has always been the casual's dream. You don't even need to interact with other people to get your welfare items.

If Blizzard wanted to make gear "more distinct and memorable", they'd do more than add one tier with four separate difficulties, three of which drop the same exact items with the same exact names and same exact stats. Gearing will still not matter outside of highest iLvl and best weighted stat.

Comentario de Atos

on 2015-05-20T12:45:00-05:00

The ilevel ramp up seems in theory good. But in reality will be a double edge sword. Even now earlier farm bosses seem boring as it's less likely you want anything from them. If you add that to being lower ilevel well earlier farm bosses will be skipped all together making most nights progression only which will burn out people even faster than now.

Comentario de PumpkinFeast

on 2015-05-20T12:51:45-05:00

I like the basic idea and that they seem to really care about this, but instead of worrying about secondary stats (and probably grinding the same boss for multiple weeks to get the desired stat,) why not simply bring back Reforging?

I hope the personal award announcement for all players will be optional, as I don't want to see LFR chat clogged with even more loot text.

...grind the rest of the early bosses with the sole purpose of getting them out of the way in order to get to usable loot?

Yeah, they kinda contradict themselves with this, since that seems like a real concern.Before Hellfire any raid member could get usable loot from any boss, now on the average it will be more like;-wait an hour or more to get a full raid-spend more than an hour to clear trash mobs and early bosses-try to kill bosses that give an actual reward-cry if you spent multiple hours on it without getting anything useable

Comentario de PumpkinFeast

on 2015-05-20T12:57:12-05:00

This is really, really something on casuals on LFR care about. Personal loot has always been the casual's dream. You don't even need to interact with other people to get your welfare items.

Relax man, listen to yourself.It's like LFR killed your family or something.Never understood all the hate, especially since you're not forced to play LFR.

I prefer personal loot over classic methods. Gives way less chance for trolling/egoism with pugs.

And mind you, as a mostly LFR player, I don't care about what complete strangers loot, so no, it doesn't cater to casuals.

Comentario de tlajos

on 2015-05-20T13:13:12-05:00

This is really, really something on casuals on LFR care about. Personal loot has always been the casual's dream. You don't even need to interact with other people to get your welfare items.

You are talking about 95% of the player population. They finance an entire division of a company to produce content for the remaining 5% - the minority called "raiders". Never forget who pays the bill.

Comentario de halospartan750

on 2015-05-20T13:15:12-05:00

Really catering to those casuals

How? These changes are just flat better for everyone.

Finally, the most visible change is the new Personal Loot UI. Part of the fun of raiding is progressing and improving as a group, not just as an individual. The previous Personal Loot system celebrated your own rewards, but would bury what your groupmates received in the chat log. However, the moment when your friend finally wins that long sought-after sword can be just as important to you as that moment you won your boots—and we wanted the game to help you celebrate it, too. Now when you loot an item, everyone in your group will see what you won!

This is really, really something on casuals on LFR care about. Personal loot has always been the casual's dream. You don't even need to interact with other people to get your welfare items.

If Blizzard wanted to make gear "more distinct and memorable", they'd do more than add one tier with four separate difficulties, three of which drop the same exact items with the same exact names and same exact stats. Gearing will still not matter outside of highest iLvl and best weighted stat.

Well I guess it's a matter of opinion then. Personal Loot has removed a lot of the drama from groups who aren't lucky enough to have a full raid team. I choose my social interaction within the game based on who I like to play with more than anything. I would prefer a group who isn't stressed about downing bosses the first time or gets irritated if someone makes a mistake. I have enough stress in real life that worrying about stress in something that I play for fun is too much. I raid with a bunch of old military vets and retirees, we haven't done a whole hell of a lot but it's a lot more fun than worrying about downing a boss to get a piece of gear that is 3.14159% better than the current piece of gear I have. We chose personal loot initially because it was a lot easier to deal with. Nobody can complain about gear because it's all on an individual basis. I don't think personal loot is a casual's dream either, we don't get welfare loot we work just as hard to down those bosses as the super hard core raiders. So who cares what method of loot distribution we choose?

Comentario de stym

on 2015-05-20T13:18:35-05:00

This is really, really something on casuals on LFR care about. Personal loot has always been the casual's dream. You don't even need to interact with other people to get your welfare items.

Because if a random system awards your loot instead of a loot master, it's welfare?Clearly you've never run normal or heroic mode in pugs with a sneaky loot master who makes up and changes rules as the raid progresses to award stuff to his/her cronies.

If the Personal Loot system evolves to be competitive loot-wise to the group or master loot system, it's a massive weight lifted off PUGs, because it flatly removes any concerns about loot distribution, and more importantly, raid comp: If a certain comp is better for a boss, you won't be afraid to use it just because it stacks a lot of players with a certain armor type or token type.

If you raid in a guild that focuses on progression, you can just ignore PL, yawn and move along.

Comentario de Casn

on 2015-05-20T13:19:57-05:00

this change should also make it easier for you to identify which items are good for you in a more interesting way than just “equip the highest Item Level.”

We often see and hear about guilds killing a late-zone boss like Blast Furnace for the first time, only to disenchant most of the drops because everyone already has loot from earlier bosses in those slots.

Blizz, you can't eat your cake and still have it.On one hand, secondary stats are supposed to be "oh so good" that lower ilvl item with good stats will be better than high ilvl. In other words, (Small) Ilvl difference means nothing without good secondary stats.On other hand, you decide to make gear from later bosses more rewarding by increasing Ilvl. So now, ilvl alone is supposed to make those items better.

This just does not work out. You either make secodary stats vary, and one class gets his BiS ring early but BiS neck from one of final bosses, while other has it other way around, or you make items that benefit specific classes just be higher ilvl.

Comentario de elhayden

on 2015-05-20T14:01:45-05:00

for pve player this seems kinda nice, but no love for pvp yet. no arena or bgs.

this all day. i can appreciate both sides and what they bring to the table, but only one side is getting anything fresh.

Comentario de PumpkinFeast

on 2015-05-20T14:29:48-05:00

WoW forums are usually full of people defending Blizz, even if they are wrong, but that Mystic Runesaber thread seems to be in unison for disliking.

Bashiok: "Mounts take a fairly significant amount of time to create,"Commenter: "suddenly mounts are such a big production.. "Seriously, the commenter is right.Zarhym used the same excuse before about Timewalking and this makes me legitimately worried, if that's a problem, then why doesn't Blizz hire more artists?Also I doubt that creating a mount (which has already existing animation mechanics) is that big of an achievement, especially compared to creating a whole major patch.

" it's sometimes difficult to see the forest for the trees."That was really mean.Basically Blizz refuses to own up to their faults and tries to blame us instead.Shame on ya'll, why don't you love and buy all shop mounts?

Comentario de ayeee

on 2015-05-20T14:30:25-05:00

Yea lol...

they make promotion vids for store mounts for no reason what so ever. just because they feel like it and not in any way to make kids open their moms/dads wallets and throw cash at blizz.

i dont believe they got any moral right to say it is a good thing to "recolor"... because come on, that what it is. Changing few old models, throwing a guy with photoshop in it to twik already existing texture patterns and then sell it for extra cash as totaly new haha forget run fly animation lol..

The only reason mount didnt went to store with 6.1 is because ppl was freakinout about not having new content at all. Keep saing you lost 3 mil ppl due to " flowing game comunity" and not because of your quest for creating content with no content in it.

that will make em comeback for sure.

Removed

Comentario de robbiedehand

on 2015-05-20T14:49:21-05:00

Really catering to those casuals

How? These changes are just flat better for everyone.

Finally, the most visible change is the new Personal Loot UI. Part of the fun of raiding is progressing and improving as a group, not just as an individual. The previous Personal Loot system celebrated your own rewards, but would bury what your groupmates received in the chat log. However, the moment when your friend finally wins that long sought-after sword can be just as important to you as that moment you won your boots—and we wanted the game to help you celebrate it, too. Now when you loot an item, everyone in your group will see what you won!

This is really, really something on casuals on LFR care about. Personal loot has always been the casual's dream. You don't even need to interact with other people to get your welfare items.

If Blizzard wanted to make gear "more distinct and memorable", they'd do more than add one tier with four separate difficulties, three of which drop the same exact items with the same exact names and same exact stats. Gearing will still not matter outside of highest iLvl and best weighted stat.

Stop using the word casual like it something bad people liek you are disgusting.

Comentario de ShiroHikari43

on 2015-05-20T14:57:22-05:00

Wow, this is looking amazing so far. Specially the LFR. I'm a casual LFR player and I'm proud of it, if anybody has a problem with it, then to bad >:D

Another great post, thanks alot Perculia :D

Comentario de Maxwelldemonic

on 2015-05-20T14:58:47-05:00

This item level ramp is going to be absurd. Hands down the highest priority for a Hunter is the DPS on the weapon. So what this means is I HAVE to use a weapon acquired later in the dungeon to do the best DPS, regardless of how poor the itemization may be. For the majority of classes, higher Int, Agi, and Str are key to their class which might force them to take poor itemization purely for the primary stat boost. It's a terrible idea and I hope they reconsider.

EDIT: Reviewed the loot

Case in point, the best stat priority gun for BM is off the first boss of the first wing. I'm going to have to drop 300+ mastery for multistrike and 150 haste for crit strike which isn't nearly as good so i can get higher weapon DPS... it's bull^&*!.